School.....

I am teaching drama again, however due to unfortunate circumstances, only have the students for 1/2 of the year. I am trying to be creative in my thinking and have started an after-school drama class on Mondays and Thursdays for an hour. It will be covered by contract time. This opens up the possibility for a play! I am thinking about doing Suessical Jr.,  or Dear Edwina. I am excited for that! I have 42 students signed up and held my first class this week. It was a little crazy! I will probably have to move it to the gym because of the size.

I am continuing with CCTV this year. I have a whole page of new ideas and am excited for it! I'll do most of the editing because I have time during the day. I'll need help occasionally.

I love living in this beautiful country, and am so grateful for the opportunity to teach the arts. I try to look at the possibilities around me, not the limitations. Just looking at a beautiful sunset inspires me. I do love teaching drama!

It's June!

I'm back to learning, at the Arts Express 2 day conference in SLC, UT. Peter H. Reynolds was the presenter and has some pretty awesome motivating tricks! He gave all of us access to two of his software programs. One is "Animation-ish" and the other is a "Stationery Studio." Great resources for teachers. Fullsail needs to look into "Animation-ish." That's an easy program that uses our artwork for an easy way to get animation into our students' hands. The stationery program has like 500 different templates to print out for students to do writing on. You can also do the writing on the computer and it prints out with really cute pictures around it on every subject under the sun. Fun stuff!

Wow! The ride is over, now for the vacation!

Gary and I are flying to Orlando Thursday to attend my graduation on Friday. I'm excited! We've never been to Disney World/Epcot Center before. I assume 2 days will never be enough time, but that's all the time we've got to spend there. It'll be fun to meet my classmates and enjoy each others company.

Final Presentation Video for Action Research

I was able to finish my video reporting on my Action Research. Here is the link! Please check it out and tell me what you think!

http://web.me.com/karyoung/Action_Research/Embedded_Final_Presentation.html

Master's Degree at FullSail-Year in Review

    The courses that I have taken for FullSail’s EMDT have been challenging and fulfilling.  I thought I knew how to write until I learned APA. I found myself in deep water and having a hard time keeping up. My mother had a stroke; I rushed up to be with her and my father and stayed for over two weeks in June. Planning the funeral and supporting my father and family had to be squeezed together with the first month of a challenging course. I felt like the CD, Sharon Wyly, was understanding and very supportive. I decided if I could pull it off that month, the rest of the year would be OK.
    In July, I was so at home with the knowledge of Multiple Learning Styles. This is such a part of me it was like coming home. Everything we learned yelled, “Yes! This is why the Arts are so important in education!”  I contend that the arts in education feed and teach the “whole child” and are what can keep a kid in school.    Dr. Deason was an inspiration. I was assigned to a group that did a project on gaming in education. I enjoyed the group collaboration. I copied many of Dr. Deason’s comments into documents so I could go back and review them.
    September opened my eyes to 21st Century learning, and was instrumental for me choosing my action research subject. I think this course is what sold me on the importance of technology in education in general. Dr. Siegel was a fun professor, and later in gaming I realized he’s pretty much crazy! I know that gaming needs to find its way into education. Not a gamer by heart, he turned my heart towards it.
    Two of the reasons I chose this program were the music and film courses. The music class was difficult, but taught me so much that is practical and useful in my job and my love of music and film. Kathy Craven was an awesome film teacher; I learned a lot in her class. Each new project was a challenge, but I grew so much! These two classes directly influenced my AR, which was teaching film to students. Our end project in cycle 1 was a music video that also was my end project in our music class.
    Flash was difficult, and LMO was too much reading, too much writing! Though I did enjoy Udutu. All in all, I have learned so much it is astounding, and I feel like a whole new world has been opened for me. What a ride!

Karlene Young Wk 4 Project publication ideas

I posted before that I was going to try and publish my project to SITE. Since seeing others’ presentations, I have decided I would like to submit it to ISTE as well, and a shortened version with a short film clip to Edutopia. My classmates suggested that one. I feel like I would like to do a lengthier version to submit to a journal that would be much longer as well. We’ll have to see if I have time to do that this next month. I haven’t looked at the new class yet.  One month left in my Master’s Program! Yea!!! I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s been a great ride.

Karlene Young Wk 4 Publishing Project Frustrations

I have been particularly frustrated trying to get ready for the Wimba session this Saturday evening. We are supposed to look at our fellow classmates’ presentations, but so many were not done, it was almost impossible to get it accomplished. I am so impressed with some of my classmates! Erin Roe’s is good enough to be published right now. She is amazing and has done an awesome job on her AR. I think Fullsail needs to hire her to teach the music class! (Nothing against Repp.) I think she needs to present at a conference with her project. Hers was 39 pages long, and I emailed her the question, “What about the 2000 words?” I had a pretty good paper when I realized it was 3000 words, so I started chopping. I feel like mine is a little too jumpy and scattered now as an article. I loved how Erin’s was so thorough. So I am guessing that we need to have several differing sizes to choose from, but I should have kept the original 3000-word doc. I feel like I am not done with this assignment. I’ll comment after the Wimba session as well.

After

Well, last night gave me a royal migraine, and then I got the flu to top it off. Six out of eight of us in my household came down with it since Thursday. I’m glad I was pretty much done with my assignments! I loved the presentation part, and would have loved to sit in on all of them. But-enough torture! My classmates are totally amazing and I am very impressed with the majority of the AR projects. I hope we can all be published.